The Devil Wears Whites

Gordon Ramsay needs a little anger management counseling. Or perhaps someone should just throw the Hell’s Kitchen star in a fight cage with Russell Crowe, Naomi Campbell, a few cell phones, and a chef’s knife and let Padma Lakshmi referee.

Still, the Michelin-starred bad boy of British cooking isn’t having the happiest of times these days. After reams of advance press and much fanfare, his eponymous restaurant at the London NYC Hotel opened to resounding yawns—and many money-swallowing no-shows, especially as the ho-hum reviews piled up. And now Bill Buford has given Ramsay the full New Yorker treatment in a piece in this week’s issue titled “The Taming of the Chef.”

Buford, who earned his kitchen stripes shadowing Mario Batali for his book Heat, tries hard to be polite. He’s awe-struck by the man’s cooking talent, especially in light of Ramsay’s hardscrabble, chips-and-crisps background. But there’s no getting around it: This is a man who likes making his employees cry.

Still, hotheaded celebs are nothing new; what’s more intriguing, however, is how, late in the piece, Ramsay cops to having framed his mentor, Marco Pierre White (also a famously temperamental and Michelin-starred London chef), with the stealing of the reservation book at Aubergine, Ramsay’s first restaurant.

Eater has the dish from both sides. And Britain’s Daily Mail claims that Ramsay could now be liable for wasting the Metropolitan Police’s resources, for the time they spent investigating the faked theft.